His job at next month’s Sochi Olympics is to drive a bobsleigh down an ice chute at 80 mph but Lamin Deen is equally adept at standing stock-still.

The 32-year-old, who clinched his Olympic place with the best drive of his life at last Sunday’s nail-biting World Cup race in Igls, Austria, is a Grenadier Guard when not competing on the ice, having spent more time than he can remember standing sentry outside Buckingham Palace in his Bearskin and tunic.

Deen almost seems relieved at the prospect of hurtling down the track at the Sanki Sliding Centre. He makes it seem a doddle compared to having to stand, poker-faced, for hours at a time in front of hordes of camera-clicking tourists, even if he is now spared that particular trial having reached the rank of sergeant.

“I’ve done it many, many, many times,” he said. “Too many times. When you do your first few you’re really proud of it and you really love it. But then it turns into two hours of just being stood there. Talking or smiling at people is something that just isn’t done.

“It’s OK now because when you go up the rank you don’t have to stand out there any more. It’s the private soldiers who do the patrolling and the sentry duty. The corporals and lance corporals will change them over, so they’ll do the reliefs between the two-hour stints. The sergeants will sit and drink coffee.”

Deen, who says he has been involved in Trooping the Colour “six or seven times” and was on duty at the Queen Mother’s funeral in 2002, has also been on tours in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Kosovo after enlisting at the age of 16.

He admits his life could easily have taken a very different direction after he and his family, who originate from Sierra Leone, moved from London to the notorious Moss Side area of Manchester when he was nine.

“It was a difficult environment but, at the time, I didn’t really realise it because I was in the mix, if you like,” he said. “I’ve got friends who are in jail now for long periods of time.”

Although he never joined a gang, Deen said he did have the occasional brush with police for “minor things and being in the wrong place at the wrong time”. He was only recently told by his sister that his mother had been secretly planning to send him away to Sierra Leone to stay with relatives to keep him out of trouble, though the Army provided an alternative exit strategy.

“She was going to disguise it as a holiday – a one-way ticket holiday,” he said. “It just so happened that I went into the careers office and started the ball rolling. My mother gave her consent and that was that. I was off to Catterick Garrison.”

An outstanding all-round athlete, Deen represented the Army at athletics, boxing and basketball but was offered a new outlet for his physical powers in 2007 after taking part in an inter-unit athletics competition in Aldershot.

The performance director of British Bobsleigh was there on a talent-spotting mission and, seeing how Deen had laid waste to his opposition in the 200 metres, invited him for a trial on the push-start facility at the University of Bath.

A year later Deen was a brakeman in the British squad, continuing a long tradition of military involvement in elite-level bobsleigh. Coincidentally, Robin Nixon, who was one half of the two-man bobsleigh crew that won Olympic gold for Britain 50 years ago, was also a Grenadier Guardsman. Deen’s own Olympic ambitions suffered a blow when he failed to gain selection as a brakeman for the four-man crew at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. He decided to take selection matters in his own hands next time by training to be a pilot in the hope of qualifying his own sled for Sochi as of right.

That plan came down to last Sunday’s World Cup showdown in Igls where Deen and his crew were in desperate need of ranking points to satisfy the British Olympic Association’s selection criteria in the four-man event.

He finished 11th – his best ever World Cup result and more than enough to secure his top-20 ranking and Olympic qualification. It sparked emotional celebrations, particularly among the three watching brakemen, including former sprinter Craig Pickering.

“It was madness,” Deen said. “Relief, too. Just flashbacks to all the years of hard work the team hard had put in.”

It has been a long, arduous journey to Sochi, but it beats standing still in a Bearskin.